Tesco has signed a £28 million deal with CA Technologies, adopting the vendor’s systems management tools as a global standard.

The UK retail giant has been a CA customer for 20 years, and has used its Unicenter systems management platform to support international operations since 2005.

“We rely on CA Technologies software to tame a very big, distributed, heterogeneous infrastructure," explained Tesco CIO Mike McNamara in a statement. "We are very pleased to extend our long-standing relationship with CA Technologies into a third decade."

CA says that products covered by the new deal include its service assurance system (used to monitor and maintain internal SLAs), its performance management tool (for monitoring mainframe performance) and its process automation solution (for automating systems management tasks).

Thanks to its many acquisitions, Tesco’s global IT infrastructure is highly heterogenous. Before launching in the US, however, it migrated its stock ordering system, originally written in COBOL, onto IBM’s System p servers (since renamed Power Systems) in order to create a globally extensible platform.

CA Technologies has recently been positioning itself as a cloud and virtual systems management provider. However, much of its revenue still comes from legacy systems management – its mainframe division accounted for 55% of its sales during the most recent financial quarter.